Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Devin Rose
Tellingly, the first Protestants laid the shaky foundation for undermining marriage, beginning with Martin Luther and King Henry VIII. Luther was a Catholic priest, which means he had “married” the Church. Yet he broke in schism
from her and then chose to marry a nun who had herself broken her vows (religious sisters are seen as being spiritually “married” to Christ). King Henry VIII drove the Church in England into schism over the desire to divorce his wife and marry another. In the well-known but tragic story that is the start of the Anglican Church, Henry VIII had two of his subsequent wives executed and divorced another.
Without the supernatural protection of the Holy Spirit, Protestant denominations simply have no defense against the creeping tide of secularism that the world has
embraced. Protestants see abortion and divorce as, at best, necessary evils in the quest for one’s self-actualization, and at worst, handy tools for extricating oneself out of a tough situation. They’ve swallowed the modernist heresies that place the individual on a pedestal above all else.
The Church’s moral teachings were true yesterday, today, and forever.
When the Protestant Reformers threw out most of the seven sacraments, they fundamentally damaged the theology behind marriage: the understanding of marriage’s nature and goods. This has unsurprisingly led to modern Protestantism’s almost univocal approval of
divorce and remarriage.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has retained the theology of marriage it received from Christ and the apostles: that a true marriage between baptized persons is sacramental and indissoluble (Matt. 19:8–9). That is why it continues to preach the same hard but loving truth that Christ taught: for va...
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Our world, so deeply in need of a Christian witness to the sanctity and permanence of marriage, instead sees the rampant divorce and remarriage among Christians as proof that these evils are acceptable, and that God doesn’t seem to help Christians stay married any more than other people. This weakening of marriage has led to the disintegration of the family, which is the fundamental cell of society.
Along with contraception, which removed the necessity of children from marriage, it has paved the way for the rise of acceptance of same-sex unions and “marriages.”
It is no coincidence that the Catholic Church has stood like a rock, unmoved and unchanged in its moral teachings against the battering waves of the modern world with its selfish and morally relative agenda. The bishops, priests, and laity of the Catholic Church have not accomplished this...
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And so our search should not be for the church that fits our personal preferences but for the Church that Christ built and to which he appointed rightful authorities, the Church that he promised to protect from error and lead into all truth, the Church that the gates of hell cannot prevail against.127 Certainly, within that Church will be people grouped by different interests and callings—there is legitimate diversity within the unity of the truth (1 Cor. 12:12–27). But on Sundays, we should all kneel united before the cross of Christ, recite the one creed, and offer the same sacrifice. Christ
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he must desire it and make it possible for all types of people to achieve.
If Protestantism is true, then no one Church has the fullness of the truth; rather, all churches teach a mixture of true and false doctrine. So it makes sense to find one that agrees on enough of the truth that you deem essential and also that appeals to your tastes and preferences. In addition, as your tastes change and your church feels less relevant, it’s your right to find a different church that meets your needs. In the end, this makes being a follower of Christ more about us than about him.
Those whom the Church calls saints were men and women who loved God and who accepted his love in a way that penetrated every part of them. As a questioning Protestant, I longed to love God as they did. They were the very best that Christians could be, the fulfillment of Christ’s commands to love God and one another with all our hearts. They were merciful, courageous, brilliant, humble, holy. And they were as Catholic as the pope!
They believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, the power of confession and the other sacraments, and the authority of the Church.
Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the sixteenth-century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses
“Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”
St. Paul was one such celibate, and he commends virginity for the sake of the kingdom in 1 Corinthians: I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be
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If Protestantism is true, then even though Jesus established celibacy for the kingdom, and Paul affirmed it in his own life and exhorted others to it, and the Holy Spirit made this vocation within the Church fruitful for centuries, in
reality it was a corrupted practice that needed to be reformed more than 1,500 years later.
Protestants ultimately stems from their beliefs about the source of God-given human authority in this world. Protestants claim that a set of sixty-six ancient books is the sole infallible authority. For them, the Church is a friendly gathering of believers, all of whom effectively have authority to interpret the Bible for themselves. Catholics, on the other hand, claim that God established his Church with divine authority passed on man to man, beginning with the original apostles and continuing today through the bishops, to teach and understand the truth, which he gave to her in the deposit of
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He provided a means for all people to know him, even before the relatively recent age of widespread literacy and the ability to print books—a time period that still represents the minority of the Christian epoch. God played a cruel joke on humanity if he intended all Christians throughout history to be like modern Protestants and know the truths of the Faith by “reading their Bibles” (which they didn’t have, since Bibles were handwritten and extremely expensive, and which they couldn’t have read anyway, because most were illiterate).
God knew this reality, of course, which is why he entrusted the truth to rightful leaders of his Church,
the men he poured his life into: the apostles. Those then chose worthy men to succeed them, to preserve and deepen the understanding of this truth within Christ’s Church—including understanding of Sacred S...
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